Lost and Found
by kittodaijoubu
Summary: The curve of his smile doesn't falter any." Fuji goes to a university far from home, sans regulars - and Tezuka. Part of an arc.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This is the first of an arc; each chapter could technically stand on its own, but I like reusing this setting, so... fujiface!

* * *

Fuji is perfectly self-possessed at the best of times; he survives Inui's juices with nary a grimace, welcomes Kikumaru's exuberance with a smile, soothes Oishi's worrying with a calming pat on the shoulder, counters Echizen's returns to his Triple Counters with new and/ or improved counters, and frightens Momo and Kaidoh into ending their fights by opening his eyes enough to let them see a mere sliver of blue. 

(A pretty shade of blue, all have agreed. Pretty in the way a Portuguese man o' war or a tree frog might be pretty.)

* * *

Somehow this self-possession has escaped him, now. He's in a university that's god knows how many miles from home because he wants to take Photography and Botany simultaneously and this is the only one that will allow it, and the crowds of people that mill around are a faceless multitude wherein everyone seems to know each other, inexplicably. 

He goes up to the registration table and looks at the list in front of him, looking for F; only his name isn't there because he's forgotten that around here they reverse the order of your name, like the individual is more important than the family from which he came.

Which makes very little sense to him, really.

The girl at the table taps her pen impatiently. It isn't her place to tell him to hurry up, even though she wants to (he can tell), because she's supposed to make him feel welcome here. He smiles a little wider than he usually does; it mollifies her enough so that he gets away without any unpleasantness.

It wouldn't have bothered him, only the girl kind of reminds him of Eiji, the tilt of her head and the way she purses her lips. But Eiji is another continent away, and if he were the girl he'd be doing a much better job making _kouhai_ feel welcome, slinging casual arms around their shoulders and talking non-stop in their ears about the canteen food, the teachers they might get, what the best sort of pen to use in lectures is.

The hall they direct him into is, paradoxically, spacious and stuffy. He looks up at the high ceiling, eyes following the silver-wrapped piping, massive and gleaming over their heads. He imagines the chaos that would follow should it collapse, wonders at the best angle to take photos of it, the least number of strokes he can get away with painting if he wanted to capture the panic-stricken mob fleeing the sudden pseudo-apocalypse.

He thinks of the willow trees outside his house, the delicate arch of their trunks, pale and slim and flecked with dark spots. His favourite cacti, left at home because he doesn't want to subject it to the long journey and Yuuta has promised to take care of it ("Yes, Aniki, I promise to take care of it on the condition you stop calling Mizuki whatever it is you're calling him in Swahili and Tagalog. I knew it was a bad idea to let you convince Nee-san into subscribing to National Geographic. Stupid tribal shows."), spines a deceptively delicate covering of white fuzz.

It's hard, but he tries not to think of blue-and-white jackets neatly folded in lockers, the _thwap_ of a ball against a racket and the way the impact jars his arm all the way up to his shoulder, the glint of sun off oval spectacles and a faint whisper of _yudan sezu ni iko_, the nearly-imperceptible brush of lips at the back of his neck before matches.

The curve of his smile doesn't falter any, but there is a raw feeling at the back of his throat and his hands are suddenly too empty, opening and closing on air.

* * *

On the third day he mistakenly calls out Tezuka's name because there is a boy standing in front of the tennis board in a lavender shirt, lean and tall with untidy brown hair. Luckily for his dignity the boy doesn't hear, but Fuji's ribcage feels hollow with the ache of missing, of helplessness and futility. 

He remembers once having whimsically remarked to Tezuka that he seemed to have misplaced his heart, somewhere. Tezuka didn't respond, but in hindsight his eyes were especially soft that day, his hands gentle where they soothed the mottled bruise on Fuji's knee.

Fuji reflects that maybe he should have said that he'd _lost_ it instead; because the distance between himself and the person with his heart (too many footsteps' worth to count, but he counts the steps anyway, one foot in front of the other) has rendered him totally disoriented.

* * *

It is fun being a tensai if it means that you get to be inscrutable and enigmatic, or so Fuji has decided. It meant that people leave him be, but they like him, because he is unobstrusive and pleasant-looking (being good-looking helps, also, because it means the girls in his class are all too shy to approach him; especially after the first day when he was the only one to give up his seat to a girl, who promptly collapsed in excited adoration and started rumours that he had a 'dangerous, smouldering gaze guaranteed to set anyone's heart afire') and he doesn't mind lying occasionally to keep people out of trouble. 

He makes enough friends to get by, to sit at a table and eat with; but none that he will consider as any more than supernumeraries.

Sometimes he sits down at his desk and tries to write to Tezuka, but he realizes after a bit that it is impossible to try and write to someone when they mostly spoke in silence.

In the end he takes a picture of the alley outside his little apartment, bricks of the enclosing walls dark with moss and crumbled at the corners; the sky is an unsure grayish hue and there is a little speck that might be a pigeon (or perhaps a plane) and sends it to Tezuka with the date and his signature on the back.

Tezuka responds with a _tadaima_; and turns up on his doorstep three days later, carrying a letter from the reputable rehabilitation clinic in Germany excusing his lateness and another of acceptance from the University.


	2. Chapter 2

It isn't in Tezuka's nature to be remotely disturbed by anything, much less show it on his face; Inui has once calculated that if he could convert Tezuka's lack of facial reaction into a marketable formula he would outsell Botox in three weeks.

But there is something extremely wrong about the fact that he's been shunted into the group that has to perform some kind of dance for a concert to commemorate the completion of Orientation (he's quite glad to celebrate the end of it, certainly, and get down to proper work) by virtue of his late arrival. Moreover, the fact that the dance includes partnerwork is both unexpected and unwelcome, because they are no longer hormonally-charged teenagers in desperate need of a better social life.

Though considering the pitch at which the girls around are giggling, and the amount of mascara on the eyelashes being fluttered in his direction, he wouldn't be surprised to find out that most have the brain capacity of the aforementioned, possibly far less.

It is a rather horrifying thought, and he winces involuntarily at the thought of being in close proximity with them for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

He hopes the rule of diffusion from higher-to-lower doesn't apply in this instance.

* * *

There are approximately four hundred and eighty people in the hall at this point. The sheer amount of noise concentrated in these few hundred square feet of space is giving Tezuka a massive headache, as is the fact that there are at least a dozen girls shooting him coy looks that look more like bad attempts at facial contortion.

He's actually seen better on deer.

Tezuka is secretly afraid that if he has to spin any of them like he's seen in those bad romantic movies, their arms might actually come off. He's pretty sure that he's seen thicker twigs than some of the arms (and waists) around the room; even his tennis racket grip looks more well-fed.

The instructor in the front is waving his arms desperately in a bid to get their attention: possibly he's trying to get them to pair up. Tezuka stands stiffly to one side, in the hopes that he will blend in with one of the pillars (coincidentally, his shirt is the same colour as them).

To his dismay, however, there is suddenly there is a hand slipped into his, warm and callused, slender fingers entwining with his.

He blinks. The audacious female has arrived in a swirl of lavender skirts and apple scent (oddly familiar, that); he doesn't know anyone with hair like that, unless –

"Hello, Tezuka-kun." Fuji is looking at him from over his (her?) left shoulder, coquettishly formal, smiling beatifically with eyes wide open in wicked glee, blue as a field of cornflowers and full of (hopefully) practiced vapidity, lined with black flicked up and out at the corners.

Tezuka's right eye twitches violently.

"Fuji. Go back to your meditation session or your clapping game or whatever it was you signed up for." He puts on his best _I-am-buchou_ voice, and realizes too late that it has never worked on Fuji, because it provokes his contrary streak instead.

Fuji turns to him and pouts; Tezuka is appalled to find that what looks dementedly fishy on anyone else is pretty on Fuji. He puts it down to whatever Fuji is wearing on his lips; it turns his mouth into a lush crimson blossom, striking against his fair complexion.

(He is even more appalled to find himself lapsing into what sounds like lines from bad love sonnets.)

There are battles to be fought and battles to be won; this happens to be neither for Tezuka.

As he turns in disapproving resignation to face the platform, Fuji's mouth crooks to the left in what can only be called triumph.

Red has always meant victory for the bearer. In this case, it is the wearer; but regardless the outcome is the same anyway.

* * *

Tezuka knew that being a tensai meant one was gifted with certain abilities, but for dancing to be one of them was slightly more than very unexpected. Fuji is, after all, a boy.

Yet for every pose he strikes the line of his body is a single fluid stroke, carelessly executed and effortlessly perfect. Next to him Tezuka feels clumsy and inadequate; he knows that for someone so physically able, he is hideously awkward and unsure, arms at odd angles and always a beat too slow. It frustrates him immensely, because he's used to having things come easily to him, where psychokinetic movement is concerned.

During their water break Tezuka sits down on a grass patch and feels the perspiration trickling down his back, collecting at the base of his spine, tries and fails to remember what comes after the torso isolations to the right and left.

"There's a difference between physical ability and physicality, Tezuka." Fuji is uncharacteristically serious. "Just because I know my arm can take this shape it doesn't necessarily mean that I'm really feeling it. You're thinking too much."

He motions to Tezuka to stand, and Tezuka does, grudgingly, because if Fuji can keep trying for him, he can damn well try for his own sake.

* * *

It is two days to performance, now.

Tezuka isn't as bad as he first was, but his arm movements still look a lot more like flailing than dance movement and occasionally he treads on Fuji's feet, or trips over the hem of his own trousers.

Fuji is very understanding about it, naturally. It makes Tezuka feel awful for being so incapable and ungentlemanly; there are moments when he forgets and refers to Fuji in his head as _she_ because the sweep of Fuji's arms and the toss of his head is distressingly androgynous.

(He's glad, though, that Fuji doesn't have a ponytail or braids to smack him in the face with when they have to execute the partner-spin thing. Lots of boys are sporting nasty bruises across their cheeks; he's heard a story about a boy who got his nose broken because his partner flung her head back too far and too hard in excitement.)

Without the instructor in front Tezuka doesn't quite remember when to turn, but he doesn't have to, because Fuji simply grabs his hand and spins himself around. His skirt flares as he does, and for a moment Tezuka sees the whirling, spinning cherry blossoms floating from the trees, airborne and weightless and unreachable.

Unconsciously, he grasps Fuji's fingers (too slim in his hand) a little tighter, and wills himself to keep up, counting_one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight _over and over in his head.

* * *

"You're much better now," Fuji tells him solemnly as they walk home from dance practice. He's still flushed and breathing lightly, eyes fever-bright with excitement; alive the way tennis could never make him (unless it was with Tezuka), because in doing this he has nothing to prove to anyone and no reputation preceding him, no unspoken expectations of _tensai_.

Tezuka smoothes flat his hair slightly self-consciously and nods slightly, once, in acknowledgement of the encouragement.

It feels like he's entirely composed of aches and his physical fitness has gone on holiday; but looking at the way Fuji is smiling at him,_really_ smiling, face palely aglow with pride and moonlight, he isn't sure he cares.

Fuji being genuinely kind has always been a balm to soothe anything, because he knows that he's the only one besides Yuuta and Kikumaru to see it as often as he does.

And really, at times like these, when Fuji's hair is in damp tendrils against his cheek and they're in a suitably secluded place, it's easy to stop thinking. Because the instinctive reaction is to reach for Fuji, put his arm around his waist, bend him over and kiss him like they're drowning.

* * *

Fuji suggests that, given his flexibility and Tezuka's secretly passionate nature, they should sign up for tango classes. 


	3. Chapter 3

Fuji notes the start of the tennis season with a slightly sinking feeling: part boredom, part dismay, mostly just sheer dread.

Because already Tezuka feels the adrenaline like a jolt to the heart, feels the slight pull in his left shoulder like a distant memory of glistening snow, during summer; sees the dark spots of sweat on the dull red court, the glint of sunlight off a metal trophy. Already he is no longer one half of an equation, and they are imbalanced: Fuji is waiting too much, and Tezuka retreating into some remote part of him that is tied inextricably and irrevocably to tennis.

If he was the competitive sort Fuji would be bitter about taking only second place, but he's used to being behind Tezuka (second singles in junior high, second place in academics in high school, always a breath too far in front to catch up with, is Tezuka), and this is just another instance, a supporting role. So he sits silently on the bench during matches, aligns his hands fingertip to fingertip, puts them together rhythmically and nearly soundlessly in a simulation of applause.

Love is nothing on the tennis courts, and Tezuka sometimes takes the tennis-is-life philosophy a bit too literally.

* * *

Tezuka wonders if there isn't something in the fact that the ball keeps going over his head, today.

Fuji on the other court is playing less well than he actually can: to be expected, certainly, but he is tensing slightly at the instant of impact, like he's afraid the vibration from hitting the ball will shiver him to pieces, little Fuji-fragments scattered over the court.

The sweat is seeping into his vision, a sourness that stings (uric acid, says the textbook), turns Fuji momentarily into a figure slightly blurred at the edges, faceless, indistinct. For a moment he is at sea.

When he was younger it was easy to pretend during matches that all that mattered was the ball coming towards him, the world shrinking to a round green blur of motion, a single point. Everything else was merely peripheral: tennis simply _was_, essential as the blue-green vein that snakes its way across the back of his hand.

(Fuji has followed this vein with his finger before, all the way to his heart, a meandering river course of deoxygenated blood. When the vein disappears he simply makes up a course of his own, finger whisper-ticklish across Tezuka's skin, which feels thin like parchment, easily punctured.)

The tennis tunnelvision thing is perhaps why he doesn't understand what he subconsciously observes: that Fuji's shoulders are a little more hunched than usual, his fingers curled a little more tightly around the white porcelain mug with the chip in the rim he usually keeps only for days when Yuuta calls and they end up arguing (over Mizuki, usually), or when Tezuka comes home especially late from classes.

There is that moment of clarity at the highest point of the ball's bounce, when it hangs in the air in anticipation of the fall, the precise moment of return. Tezuka knows when to return it, but not how this time, because he's afraid that it might be way out if he doesn't do it right.

* * *

"Fuji."

"Tezuka."

They could be doing this all night, Fuji thinks tiredly, passing names back and forth, a subtle, verbal method of finger-pointing, pushing of blame (that shouldn't exist, but does, the human need to assign fault) This isn't something doubles partners can afford to do, but then again this is why they are not doubles players.

It's the first he's seen of Tezuka in days, between Fuji's queer course hours and Tezuka's insane ones and his tennis practice. In some ways it could be an affair, except that Tezuka is really just being faithful to his true love and Fuji settles for being second best because he is resigned to it: without his tennis, he would've been without Tezuka. An irony of the highest degree.

He picks at the fraying hem of his pajamas, faded and striped and too big for him ("You'll grow into it, Syuusuke," insisted his mother over Yumiko's predictions.) It was too big back when he was sixteen; it still slips off his shoulder occasionally, at twenty-something years (actually five and a bit, because he is a leap year baby).

They stop, and there is silence punctuated sharply by the boys next door dropping something that lands with a heavy thunk.

Everyone thinks Fuji is patient, but he's actually just gotten used to waiting. He waits now, watching Tezuka not-fidgeting, straight and tall and still, an unbending lamppost with the rustle of leaves blowing past at its base, the depths of an undisturbed lake, limpid and endorheic. Nothing enters, nothing leaves.

So he does, snatching a coat off the rack on the way.

Tezuka looks at the door, shut quietly and politely after Fuji, swears out loud for the first time in his life.

* * *

Outside it is dark; the lamps attempt, feebly, to dispel the darkness, an unsure orange bloom in the night. Fuji wonders if the stars are watching like Neil Gaiman says they do, if there are little princes traversing the galaxy, suffering wanderlust and wonderlust both.

Lust is such an ugly word, uncontrolled desires and impatience and base implications, reeking of desperation. What he feels for Tezuka has never been that: it is instead the need to reach out and feel something solid, something that isn't a vague notion or impossibly heroic ideal. It isn't a thrill with every beat of his heart, more the burn of helpless need that is not dependency; it fills him, overflows, surely he glows with this yearning, some days.

In a way it's an avenue to the end to the one kind of love he knows how to give, stifling and protective and ultimately destructive. This is why he holds back, in declaring affection and bestowing it, his fear of domination. (but whether of himself, or by himself, he isn't sure.)

The thing about genius is that you can afford to choose how much you want to give, because there is no limit but the degree of your want. Fuji revels in the freedom of this, has never known any different, easily mastered the art of making things look easy.

Odd, how different it is with Tezuka. If he had to describe it he would say it feels like an infringement of his negative liberty, almost a compulsion, a coercion into perseverance. But in many ways it makes him a better person, this _thing_, it makes him try harder, be gentler and more accommodating, practice forgiveness and compromising. Greater positive liberty, then.

It's colder than he thought it would be, the chill seeping through the little spaces between the fibres of his coat, into his bones. Tezuka might be worried, might have called the police, might even now be running frantically through the streets calling for him, at the expense of his dignity and self-composure. There could be white floodlights cutting wide white swathes across the grounds, a mournfully howling dog in the distance, a lone bat winging its way home, an eerie herald of dark.

Fuji looks up at the sky, at the silvery moon, beautiful and mysterious from a distance, the stuff of romance and sonnets and poetry; pockmarked up close, luminously alone.

(There was a story about a Chinese poet who drowned because he reached for the moon's reflection in the water: but he doesn't see the moral in that (unless it's don't imbibe too much alcohol, that he can understand). He tried, didn't he, at the very least. Died trying.)

The boys in his class used to tease him; good-naturedly, of course, because boys are like that. He had too much of an imagination, they said, too much intelligence. He stared out of the window during class at the leaves on the tree in the courtyard, watching the leaves changing colours, wrote compositions about their bleeding yellow-orange-red outwards from the stalk, detaching and catching on the air currents, one-winged butterflies in their quest to be whole and mate as real ones do; severed goldfish tails jagged at the edges, lost in space. During lunch he arranged his bento according to colour, took the laughter and the teasing and the lack of understanding into himself, returned it with a smile that was only slightly shaky for the first term.

He should quit deluding himself, because Tezuka doesn't go to people (another thing to resent Echizen for, though it isn't his fault that he is brilliant and young and full of potential that he isn't afraid to fulfill, because he has a never-ending source of it), he waits and eventually his natural magnetism kicks in, people re-align themselves towards him, gravitate in his direction.

Fuji clutches his coat at the neck with one hand, sticks his other hand into his pocket, and walks in the general direction of home.

* * *

When he gets back there is only a note on the door in Tezuka's writing, a single line scrupulously straight across the paper, evenly spaced words.

_Gone to bed, key in the usual place._

Tezuka defies expectation easily, transcends it: but he doesn't, where it actually matters.

* * *

They leave the house together the next morning, because it's pretty much impossible to avoid someone you live with, and they do have the same class. But they take care not to accidentally-brush, as if overnight someone has carefully demarcated the boundaries of personal space and it is unthinkable to overstep them, a crossing of the demilitarized zone. Washing up after breakfast becomes a tiresome and complicated ritual, resembling a bizarre mating dance that really means mutual avoidance.

The class they share isn't something they're both terribly passionate about, it's to do with physical geography and has nothing very much in common with either medicine or photography. Tezuka chose it as a rare indulgence to himself, because he likes mountains and nature; Fuji chose it simply because it hasn't got anything to do with what he's majoring in and what he learns might make for good dinner conversation ("Lake overturn is when carbon dioxide is released from the bottom of a lake and suffocates things. It killed 1,800 people in Cameroon. Also, the Yellowstone National Park caldera might explode any time.")

Right now they're doing the continental drift theory, as proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915. That the seven continents were once a giant landmass is an amazing thing to Tezuka, as is the fact that the mountains he so respects are the cumulative result of little movements, a few centimeters a year. There is only that much distance between him and Fuji, now: if he so wished he could shift his weight a little to the right and bump their elbows together.

He's forgotten to factor in the geologic time scale, the eons needed for the collision. One needs to think in millions of years, not minutes. It could take that much time to understand Fuji, more to chart the path they're taking, figure out whether they're converging, diverging, chafing each other. And beneath everything there is that which simmers, semi-molten and perpetually only on the verge of solidifying, never verbalized.

Possibly it is time for something to give: he is not as dense as Fuji thinks he is, and since subduction could be a sort-of illustration of the meaning of compromise, something good might come of it all. Good as mountains, hopefully.

Fuji stops doodling on his handout when a note lands on the centre of his desk, folds crisp and corners aligned.

_Dinner at five_,_there's a photography exhibition downtown open until ten, and the park is open all night_.

**You have tennis practice until seven, Tezuka**.

Tezuka looks at Fuji over the rims of his glasses, severely. He could be a teacher speaking to a particularly slow child; Fuji fights the sudden irrational urge to giggle.

The note lands back on his desk.

_It wasn't a suggestion, Fuji. But I would like to add that the street tennis courts are open all night, too._

Fuji twists in his seat, looks up at Tezuka and the corners of his mouth crook upwards in a syncline of a smile.

**Of course, Tezuka. **

Maybe Tezuka does exceed all expectations, after all.


End file.
